


Wizards' Children

by Aleaiactaest, Slyjinks



Series: Valentine & Vimes [11]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Fallout 4
Genre: Absurdly Divided School (trope), Bullying, Character finding themsleves in the wrong genre, Children Forced to Kill (trope), DiMA-centric, Enfant Terrible (trope), Gen, Krull (Discworld), M/M, Mindscrew, Sexual Harassment, World Domination Attempts, Young Adult Dystopia, magical transformation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-03-08
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:08:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29758023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aleaiactaest/pseuds/Aleaiactaest, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slyjinks/pseuds/Slyjinks
Summary: Unseen University is (finally!) taking women and girls as students, and it's somehow all DiMA's fault. Since it's his fault, he's the one who's now expected to have an away semester in one of the areas of the Disc that has long been turning out woman wizards: Krull. Unfortunately, when he gets there he learns that does not only do Krull wizards still engage in Dead Men's Pointy Boots method of advancement, but that the students themselves are expected to get a head start in the murder of peers just to graduate. DiMA will have to deal with attempts on his life, attempts on his free time, a ridiculous sorting ritual, an insidious magical artifact, diplomacy, Home Echo-Gnostics classes, and a football enthusiast, all while trying to keep up with his classes and dealing with the creeping suspicion that he might have slipped into the wrong genre entirely.
Series: Valentine & Vimes [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1689076
Comments: 3
Kudos: 3





	1. Self-Incrimination * Eskarina Smith * Obliged * Jemzarkiza

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has a song list available [on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [Nothing to Remember](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQgkDvV_t4Y&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq&index=1) by Neko Case, [Let the Wind Erase Me](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_dyVl7z9NTs&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq&index=2) by Assemblage 23, and [Chrome](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FTL8NtqGdw4&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq&index=3) by VNV Nation
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Self-Incrimination * Eskarina Smith * Obliged * Jemzarkiza_

__

> _“As rare as wizards’ children,” an expression, used with much the same meaning as, “As rare as hens’ teeth,” but…_

After DiMA returned to Ankh-Morpork from Krull, he submitted a tidy report to Mister Stibbons. He greeted his classmates. He unpacked his luggage, and he unpacked his Inventory.

Then he found his brother, who gave him a hug and a patented Nick Valentine smile, and his brother asked, “So how did it go, DiMA? I see you didn’t get a tan, heh.”

DiMA considered. “There are parts I would like to forget, which suggests to me that it is especially important that I remember them, so I feel compelled to let you know that I killed someone.”

Nick looked stricken, and for a moment, the whirr of his fans and the hum of his wires stopped. Every servo was still. Then he crossed his arms, glowering, and he asked, “DiMA, is this that thing you do where you paint whatever it was you did in the most absolutely incriminating light?”

“Possibly,” DiMA admitted. “Let me tell you, and then you can decide for yourself. I need someone to keep me honest.”

So DiMA told Nick. Not all of it. There were parts that were private. But he told him enough.

* * *

* * *

Noble families were bred for breeding, or they didn’t last long. It did, however, lead to situations such as an embarrassment of daughters.

When the Balnallies had gotten through four, it had become rather clear that the eldest was going to have to be the family heir, so they’d found her a good match in the form of a marriage to a likely lad from another noble family.

The second was given to the church, and she became an Abbess of the Spiteful Sisters of Seven-Handed Sek.

The third they grudgingly sent to the prestigious Military Academy in Sto Lat. Given a chance, young noble girls were at least as enthusiastic about leading the peasantry into doomed infantry charges as the boys were.

Number four, the one who had made them despair of ever having a son, had gone to the Assassins’ Guild, in one of its first classes that officially accepted young ladies, and she’d Taken Black. Being an Assassin was a fine choice for a noble.

But tuition was expensive.

Five had the misfortune of being pretty enough to marry well.

Six went to Blind Io, because it was always good to hedge one’s bets and spread the faith around between multiple gods.

Seven went off to the Military Academy to squire for her older sister.

And seven plus one, Marcella, was the problem, as seven plus one typically was. One Assassin was quite enough for a family, so she’d been sent to the Quirm College for Young Ladies, with the thought that she could be properly educated to entice a husband, one who would surely be wowed by her skills in flower arrangement. The Quirm College taught such things as Languages…

...and she mastered Llamedosian, High Uberwaldian, Quirmian, Morporkian, Brindisian, Latatian, Ephebian, Omnian, Low Dwarfish, Klatchian, Nothingfjordi, Trollish, Iztanzian, and Howandalandian, expressing a regret that the Quirm College didn’t have a tutor in Agatean nor any particularly good reference dictionaries from which she might instruct herself... 

...then she mastered Biology, Hygiene, History, Physical Education, Logic, Maths, Music, and…

...Blit Studies.

Blit Studies, like Music, was taught by a workman’s wizard who considered himself a cut above those _village_ wizards who were barely a cut above witches. He could have taught at a proper university, he’d say. He just didn’t feel like it. Given that it was well known that wizards didn’t have any balls1, he was thought to be safe enough around the delicate young ladies.2

Blit was related to Slood as Space was to Time, and it comprised an essential component of a seven-dimensional library classification system discovered by Archchancellor Scrubbs. Apparently, being a librarian was a vaguely acceptable career for fine young ladies who weren’t quite ladies, who were more what might be called aspiring middle class, but if being a librarian was all that Marcella had done, it would have ended there.

Marcella had gotten into the wizard’s books. Her parents would claim that she’d merely been trying to tidy up the books, that she’d never meant the unfortunate incident that had happened with the goose, the History teacher, and the apple cobbler - but it was a dickens of a thing to cover up. That was what had led to her parents hurriedly bundling her up and dumping her on Unseen University.

Because Unseen University was taking ladies now, wasn’t it? They had that commoner, didn’t they? Hadn’t UU, ahem, in fact, taken ladies since 1966, as the university was now so proud of claiming?

The Faculty had tried to weasel out of that, claiming that it was more a theoretical acceptance of young ladies, you know, one and done, they could say they’d done it, it wasn’t that they needed to do it again. Okay, so there was Rosanna Fitget, but she was Dr. Hix’s apprentice, and Dr. Hix was an allowable evil, so she hardly counted. There was the plumbing issue -

\- which had been sorted by DiMA, not long after Dr. Hix accepted Rosanna - really, what Post-Mortem Communications Professor was going to pass up the chance to have a creepy little girl in his department? They added so much to the ambiance - so the plumbing excuse had been stripped away from the Faculty.

The thing was, though few people knew it, that the Unseen University was built for the containment of men who did things like throw fireballs at other men, and it was meant to contain and distract them with cheese so that they threw fireballs at precisely no one. After the bit with the goose, the History teacher, and the apple cobbler, Marcella was a person in need of some containment. 

So there’d been shuffling and _erms_. Something done once opens a sort of door in reality. It makes it easier to be done and done again. Because it had been done once, so long ago, in 1966, and then again, by Rosanna, it had become easier, and Marcella was accepted, though it was generally agreed that she was going to have to attend classes in a curtained booth, so that she wouldn’t distract her classmates.

DiMA thought having a curtained booth in class was more distracting than having a woman, but what did he know?

Alf said dismissively, “DiMA, you being a molly, you just don’t _get it_.”

DiMA steepled his fingers and pointed out, “I somehow manage to avoid being distracted by all the _men_ in my classes. It’s not hard.”

“Yeah, that’s ‘cos men just aren’t as attractive as women,” said Alf.

But Unseen University had another girl, and somehow, this was All DiMA’s Fault, and since he was the Chair of the Nontraditional Students’ Association, clearly DiMA was supposed to do something about it.

What DiMA did about it was make sure she knew where to buy textbooks and supplies, mostly.

In any case, DiMA was leaving soon for Krull for that semester away that the Patrician had heavily hinted that DiMA needed to take, and the the Vice-Chair of the Nontraditional Students’ Association, Glori Orison, could deal with the whole issue of the additional woman. DiMA was loath to dump his problems, even if he wasn’t sure why they were his problems, on someone else, but surely, there was nothing wrong with relying on someone else for a bit of help?

DiMA needed to dump out a bin of High Energy Rubbish, which also contained a student wizard in a class a few years behind DiMA. Students wizards liked to duel, generally speaking, but DiMA found that he simply didn’t have the time for it. So his duelling partners tended to end up summarily dumped in the rubbish bins. Tukore the Teal would sleep it off, wake up in the rubbish pile, maybe with his shoes turned into flying plates by the stray magic that tended to build up on the rubbish heap, and DiMA would be back to work.

There had apparently once been a cottage at the dump site, but now, DiMA wouldn’t call it much of anything aside from a seething mass of discarded magic. The whole area was obscured by a magical fog. DiMA had considered setting up some Fog Condensers and condensing clean, recycled magic out of it. The High Energy Magic Building had access to an almost unlimited supply of magical energy, but for one thing, it was energy of a rather precariously dangerous sort, and for another thing, it was mainly used to keep the university warm in the winter and cool in the summer and to skive out of paying for coal.

Also, Zinon had expressed that he was certain he could make some interesting cocktails if DiMA condensed out recycled liquid magic from the air.

Maybe DiMA would set up some Condensers when he returned from Krull. He looked up from dumping out the bin - and Tukore the Teal, and he saw - there was a woman in the Fog. DiMA stiffened, and he closed his eyes - the octarine in this area was almost blinding, anyway - and he listened to his Geiger counter. This area wasn’t any more _radioactive_ than baseline Ankh-Morpork3, but magic and radiation were related to each other in a non-Euclidean manner, so his Geiger counter was making a noise that was not so much an actual noise as it was a sideways rotation of a noise.

It wasn’t real radiation, which might have invoked the Mother of the Fog, just an unreal echo. DiMA didn’t think he was hallucinating the way that he had been when he’d been deprived of defragmentation for days and had started seeing the Mother of the Fog out of the corner of his optics in unguarded moments. That meant that the woman was actually there. A wizard had to see what was in front of him. DiMA unshuttered his optics.

The woman was still there, and she’d come a few steps closer. DiMA could see her more distinctly. She was a confused mesh of human signifiers of both youth and age, her hair white. She appeared to be trying to think of several things all at once.

Humans kept trying to do that. They weren’t any good at it. DiMA had resigned himself to the fact that trying - and failing - to multitask was merely a quirk of human existence.

She also didn’t appear to be all there. DiMA greeted hesitantly, “Hello. Are you... all right?” and as he was saying that, he did as Hex did, and he started systematically trying to determine the nature of the magical effect that was on her, an effect that made her less than entirely there...

“Quite fine,” she said briskly, taking another step closer. She wore heavy, stiff clothing and big boots, the sort of sensible clothing one might don for traipsing through a pile of magical waste. “Are you DiMA yet?”

That was a particularly interesting question, DiMA thought, as he ran regressions on the spectral scattering of the octarine wavelengths that were emitted by her reflection on nearby objects. “I have been DiMA as long as I have been a me. And you are, Miss...?”

“But you’re a you right now. Good. I’m Miss Smith, for the moment.” She nudged Tukore’s sleeping form with one of her big boots. “Students still duel these days? Sillies. Of course, we’d dump them in the Ankh in my… nevermind. You’re DiMA, and you’re a you, and everyone’s blaming you for the, hmm, nontraditional students?”

“Not _everyone_. Merely a large number of the people with whom I interact with on a regular basis,” DiMA said wryly. “But what is it to you?” Based off the spectral readings, she wasn’t shifted in either the blit or slood dimensions...

“It is and isn’t personal,” said Miss Smith, shaking herself out, “Do you know, witchfinding is an underwomaned field?”

“Since you told me, yes,” DiMA said absently. The thing was, picking the magical effect apart, it didn’t look like witches’ magic, although DiMA had slim to none experience with witches’ magic.

“There’s likely girls who don’t get found all the time,” said Miss Smith. “The ones who want it will find it, of course, and plenty who do find it prove to be unsuitable, but the fact remains that a not-insignificant number of girls who _could_ have and could have done _well_ never do.”

“You are a witch concerned about the recent enrollment of Marcella,” DiMA concluded. Some of the strands looked almost exactly like the unmagic described by _Simon_ _et E. Smith_ , back in the seminal treatise from 1970…

E. Smith?

“Not exactly on either count. It’s happened, and it will happen again, and it will get easier each time. But there will be downstream effects. Someone has to be thinking about those,” said Miss Smith.

DiMA clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You are E. Smith.”

The strand unravelled entirely. She was gone.

1 Only a yearly dance called the Excuse Me.

2 The same ones who played lacrosse.

3 Which was more radioactive than most people expected it to be. Uselessium was a byproduct of cooking troll drugs, and it tended to end up dumped just any old place. DiMA thought he might have to set up some more conventional Fog Condensers to deal with that problem, too.

* * *

DiMA sat down at a chair near Hex and typed in some commands, because while Hex could and did talk, sometimes Hex preferred nonverbal communication, and DiMA was always pleased to oblige Hex. What he wrote wasn’t exactly: _She was working with time unmagic_ , but it conveyed that general sense, if one wanted to be horribly imprecise in translating what was actually communicated.

He studied Hex’s reply, and they conversed back and forth some more. The discussion circled back around, as it often did between them, to DiMA’s memory issues. He didn’t have them yet, but he would in, oh, a hundred years or so. It was a part of his narrative.

Unless DiMA wrote a new one.

Hex had some ideas about that.

* * *

DiMA did not receive summons to the Palace as often as he once had, when Leonard da Quirm had been ill and indisposed, and that suited DiMA fine. When he did receive summons these days, it was usually to play Thud! or Stealth Chess. If DiMA shut off most4 of his personality to free up extra processing power and shut down the little ‘tells’ in his behaviour, he could win about 50% of the time, at the price of having a horrific dissociative episode.

DiMA thought that was the point he was supposed to be learning. You can win… sometimes… if you give up everything you are… and you still won’t like the cost.

This missive was different. DiMA was instructed to bring another student, one named Pondlife. DiMA didn’t recognize that name, which necessitated finding the Professor of Recondite Architecture and Origami Map Folding, who also didn’t know that name but was nonetheless able to direct DiMA to where that name could be found.

Pondlife turned out to be an unusually sporty looking student wizard of about age 16. He had scrapes on his knees and multi-coloured grass stains on his robes. He did as many wizards did upon first seeing DiMA, and drew a few incorrect conclusions, chained them together, and decided to start casting, one hand clutching his staff like a teddy bear, the other scribing out some runes in the air, and his mouth opened to say - 

“No,” DiMA said firmly, giving Pondlife a meaningful glare.

Pondlife blinked owlishly at him.

DiMA said tiredly, “Whatever you’re thinking I am, no. My name is DiMA, I’m a synthetic lifeform made by Hex, to get that out of the way, and the Patrician asked me to come get you.” He held up the letter.

Sheepishly, Pondlife looked at the letter, mumbling, “Thought you were something out of the Dungeon Dimensions. Anyway… look, I was lost in the library for three or five years like it was a day, and I’ve only been out a month. Can’t blame me for being out of sorts.”

Most wizards were ‘out of sorts’ over far less, so DiMA did not, in fact, blame him.

“Y’see, I was looking for a book on foot-the-ball,” then he corrected himself, “erm, football, and the problem was, it hadn’t been written yet? Only I didn’t know that, so the Library kept me in there until the book _had_ been written. At least, that’s what I figure. It’s funny, how much it’s all changed in a few years? We were gonna play Ankh-Morpork United - and I guess we did, and won, too, nice job, that… and now it’s all divided. There’s city leagues, and the city teams play other city teams, and there’s an academic division that plays over the Archchancellor’s Hat…” Pondlife continued on, going on about football as he and DiMA walked to the Palace.

DiMA let him talk.

Pondlife kept chattering in the waiting room, though after a few minutes, he hesitated. Shivering, he admitted, “...that ticking’s horrible.”

“The pattern repeats after seven plus one minutes,” DiMA said quietly.

Pondlife blinked. “Does it? Oh. I s’pose that’s all right, then. So like I was saying, they’ve changed so many of the rules!5 You can’t be offside on a throw-in anymore! -”

DiMA continued to listen. He was learning so many things about football, things that he didn’t care about, which he had already tagged as memories to dump the next time that he defragmented.

Drumknott called for them. Aside from the Patrician, there was already a woman in the office. She was a relatively slim woman, albeit robust and wiry, with the look of a sprinter. Her skin might have been described as midnight black by a poet, but not the midnight of smoggy, light-polluted Ankh-Morpork, the midnight of some place that had the decency to get properly black at night. Her hair was white, though she didn’t look old, and she wore a pale lip gloss like moonlight. She was a showy dresser, in upper class robes inscribed with constellations and high heels. She also wore a haughty sneer. Most importantly of all, she was pulling a wand out of a sheath on her forearm.

DiMA had barely any time to process any of that because the first thing she did was try to throw a lightning bolt at Pondlife. He didn’t have time to disrupt her train of thought; the way that she was casting had almost nothing in common with any magic DiMA had ever seen. DiMA just threw himself in front of the lightning bolt.

He was a Faraday cage. The lightning passed over and around him, and it was _unpleasant_ , but ultimately, it did nothing.

Pondlife squeaked, clutched at his staff, misspelled one of the runes that he was scribing in the air, and manifested a full bouquet of a dozen three day old roses.

Drumknott sighed.

The corner of Vetinari’s mouth twitched ever so slightly, and he said, “Miss Jemzarkiza, that was quite uncalled for.”

Miss Jemzarkiza was already chaining off a gust of wind directed at Pondlife, but DiMA had seen enough, and he moved right in front of her, grabbed her wrist, and pulled her wrist off to the side. The wind went off with a bang and knocked down a section of crown moulding from the ceiling, moulding which had been decorated with frolicking rats. DiMA got the wand out of her grip, focused a moment, and… _lock._

DiMA then stepped away from her and held out the wand hilt-first. Jemzarkiza glared icily at him. She turned to the Patrician and demanded, “You said there’d be two student wizards. That’s an artificer,” she pointed at Pondlife, “and a war golem!” she pointed at DiMA.

Then Jemzarkiza glared at her wand and clearly tried to channel a few different things through it, without success.

The Patrician sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Miss Jemzarkiza, you are _quite_ incorrect.” He gestured expansively. “DiMA and Pondlife are two student wizards. As I said.”

“She’s an enchantress!” Pondlife shrilled, hiding behind his bouquet of roses.

Jemzarkiza demanded of Pondlife, “What did that thing,” she pointed at Pondlife, “do to my wand!?”

“I dunno, I just met him,” Pondlife blurted.

“I locked it,” DiMA supplied helpfully.

Jemzarkiza took a moment. “He’s not an artificer. He didn’t build… that thing.”

“As I said,” the Patrician said, an irritated edge just barely showing.

Jemzarkiza looked over at DiMA, something very much like disgust on her face. “This thing locked my wand?”

“A simple and effective method of de-escalating a situation,” DiMA said absently. 

“How!? That’s magic -” Jemzarkiza started.

“Unmagic,” DiMA offered, ever accomodating, “but I do perform magic as well, insofar as I am, as his Lordship had mentioned, a student wizard.”

A student wizard who had no time for silly duels.

Jemzarkiza turned on the Patrician. “You let a golem do wizard’s magic?”

At the same time, Pondlife asked no one in particular, “You let a woman do wizard’s magic?”

“I’m not a golem,” DiMA said quietly. _Golems are much nicer than I am._

“He does it. There is not a matter of ‘letting’, which is what I would also say of you, Miss Jemzarkiza,” said the Patrician.

Jemzarkiza crossed her arms and paced. “This isn’t going to work. I’m not the only one who is going to take one look at that thing, think that the Disc must have birthed the second coming of Goldeneyes Silverhand Dactylos, and look for the artificer that created it to… deal with him.”

DiMA inquired, “You tried to kill Pondlife because you thought he was the artificer who made me?”

Irritably, Jemzarkiza snapped, “Yes, well… war golems aren’t intelligent. They’ve got to have a controller.” She looked back at Vetinari. “The… Pondlife one’s probably fine, though he’s stupid if he brings a flower bouquet to a wand fight, but this… thing isn’t going to work.” She glared some more at DiMA.

“I’m certain that you’ll all learn to get along,” Vetinari said smoothly. “I will also note that _he_ ’s not the one raising a fuss over a female wizard.”

Jemzarkiza sighed heavily, and for a brief moment, DiMA found himself feeling quite oddly sympathetic for her. She swore, “Fate’s eyes. Sto Plains wizards are so repressed.”

DiMA considered, and he hesitated. “The Unseen University has only recently started accepting female students, and so I wanted to see how Krull handles female students - since you clearly turn out female wizards - in order to have some guidance on the matter.”

“I mean, she’s not really a wizard, is she? She’s got to be an enchantress or something,” Pondlife speculated, his back to the door.

“Yes, I’m a wizard,” Jemzarkia hissed, “An enchantress is something completely different, which I will thank you to remember. And the best thing you lot could do for any aspiring female wizards is send them to literally any other place than Unseen University. Pompous idiots, the lot of them.”

“Nevertheless, they’re already here,” DiMA said soberly. “I’m the Chair of the Nontraditional Students’ Association. I have a duty to see that my people are protected.”

He was ridiculous, he knew, a mere student going on about duty. Not even Faculty cared about duty.

Jemzarkiza squinted at DiMA but asked the Patrician, “Is it imp tech?”

DiMA answered anyway, “No. I run on the annihilation of matter. And the occasional coffee.”

Pondlife appeared to be trying to reverse engineer the druidic magic that allowed one to pass through wood as if it were air in a futile quest to get through the door without anyone noticing.

Wearily, Jemzarkiza said, “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve seen today, and I had one of that little Dibbler fellow’s sausages for breakfast.” She shook herself out. “Anyway, it’s not going to work.”

“I see. You’re implying that your countrymen are too biased -” the Patrician started.

“Yes! We are!” Jemzarkiza agreed. “Of course we’re biased. You’re all foolish foreign devils who let dwarfs and trolls and who knows what all else into your cities. We see where that leads you, and we want none of it. They can stay out on the Length, where they are neither seen nor heard, thank you. Just find a different student, and let _him_ get over his feelings about _hers_.”

DiMA idly ran the calculations of how long another student would last if he was at least as likely as Pondlife to say unpleasant things about the concept of female wizards, and if he assumed that female wizards were at least as easily offended as the male ones were… no, he didn’t like those results. Someone like DiMA might draw a fireball to the face, but another Pondlife was going to get swirlied, and arcane toilets had an unfortunate tendency to be portals to other dimensions.

DiMA knew.

So they needed a student who had at least some sense of decorum and who had no strong objection to female wizards and who didn’t look like DiMA. He took a step to the side…

...and into a different narrative, just slightly.

The corner of the Patrician’s mouth twitched, and DiMA concluded that something rather horribly magical must have happened to the Patrician sometime in the past, because he usually didn’t react that much; he’d have to ask Lady Sybil about it. DiMA looked down at his hands, which were brown, with neatly trimmed nails. He didn’t look for a mirror or anything like that. If he looked in a mirror, he knew that nothing would have really changed. DiMA wasn’t the Sole Survivor, with a polynomial number of customization options in front of the mirror.

But for now, the narrative held, and Jemzarkiza, Pondlife, Drumknott, and the Patrician were all looking at someone with brown skin, cloudy grey eyes, and black-brown-grey tightly curled hair plaited into thick, cable-like braids. Jemzarkiza and Pondlife were probably expecting him to look about 16, so perhaps he looked about that age, but the Patrician and Drumknott likely saw someone older. They surely thought they were looking at a human, although the Patrician might have had an inkling otherwise.

DiMA was a Generation 3 synth. It wasn’t hard to find a narrative where he might have been upgraded to a Gen 3 - that story practically wrote itself - and it took only a trivial amount of energy to shift to one of those storylines. He held up his hand and rubbed his thumb over his fingertips - goodness, but it all felt so strange! - and he asked, “Is this acceptable?”

DiMA was not ashamed of what he was. He wanted to talk other people into accepting him and accepting every other person in this world on their own merits. He did, however, draw a line at putting other people into danger over what he was. He wasn’t going to endanger Pondlife.

“How long have you been able to do that?” the Patrician inquired smoothly.

“Just now,” said DiMA, though he’d been working on the theoretical underpinnings of utilizing narrative shifts as an efficiency optimization routine for polymorphs for weeks. He and Chatur had a bet, and now, DiMA was quite certain that he’d win.

Jemzarkiza circled him, examining him warily. “How long can you hold that polymorph?”

It was a valid question. A traditional polymorph was a horrendous expenditure of magical energy, and wizards were inherently difficult to transmute, although it wasn’t impossible. DiMA, unlike Pondlife, didn’t have his staff with him, so Jemzarkiza could clearly see that DiMA was lacking a traditional power reservoir. Walking about with one’s staff in public was a bit… aggressive in these times, though certainly not unheard of. 

For this trick, DiMA was just pulling off ambient narrative energy, and the simplest narrative answer was… “...I would request a private room, without mirrors.”

Jemzarkiza rolled her eyes. “Too shy for the dormitories? Fine, we’ll say you have terrible eczema.” She looked at the Patrician. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“So does everyone, Miss Jemzarkiza. That is why I remain where I am. That hope. Now, Pondlife… in addition to your semester abroad, you are to instruct the Krullian wizards in the ways of football, so that they can also field a team in the academic leagues. I have been informed that the Archchanellor’s Hat desires some variety in its options,” the Patrician said wryly. “DiMA, we’ve discussed prior, but aside from studying how the Krullians have managed their academic integration of female wizards, I have a small task for you. Dispose of this box off the Edge. Don’t look inside. It’s merely hazardous waste.”

Drumknott held out a box to DiMA, which DiMA took. There was something that leaked faint octarine through the box seams, and it seemed to vibrate slightly in his hands. “As you wish, my lord.”

“There will also be a diplomat sent with you. Drumknott, I do believe that the Ankh-Morpork diplomatic corps settled on Sir Carillon Selachii?” said the Patrician.

Drumknott nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“One hopes he will turn up on time when you are all ready for the... transport, but happy accidents do occur,” mused the Patrician. “Now, don’t let me detain any of you further - and Miss Jemzarkiza, you can fill out the fine for the moulding down with the Damages Clerk on the ground floor.”

4 But not all. A perfectly rational person has difficulty deciding between two just-as-good choices. That’s what personality’s for.

5 [So many football rules changes, and DiMA is now learning all of them.](https://the18.com/soccer-entertainment/lists/timeline-soccer-rule-changes-evolution-laws)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** [The Quirm College for Young Ladies](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Quirm_College_for_Young_Ladies) used to have Professor Bengo Macarona, a wizard, teaching there, which implies that there may often be a wizard on staff (ha-ha). Among other things, he taught [blit studies](https://wiki.lspace.org/mediawiki/Blit). So what happens if a young lady gets into the staff wizard’s books, hmm? 
> 
> [Novella d'Andrea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novella_d%27Andrea), an early female academical, was forced to teach from behind a curtain, so as to not distract her students. [Bettisia Gozzadini](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettisia_Gozzadini) had to wear a veil. Etc.
> 
> Krull is interesting, insofar as it is very much early-early-series Discworld, but it never gets retconned out, and in fact, there are a few references to it late in the series. So, on the edge of the Disc, there’s a nation that not only has female wizards, but has always had female wizards. That’s an interesting cultural variation compared to the Sto Plains, isn’t it? It also means that Eskarina Smith was _never_ the first female wizard, merely the first female Sto Plains wizard.
> 
> The basic premise of this story is that DiMA gets trapped in a genre that is wildly inappropriate for him: Young Adult Dystopia. 
> 
> Unseen Academicals has this weird subthread about the Archchchancellor’s Hat and how football teams were going to compete over that. We continue that thread here. Pondlife is a canon character from that book. He put in a brief appearance in “You Can’t Say Fuck in a Terry Pratchett Novel”, prior to his escape from the Library.
> 
> Jemzarkiza is a secondary canon character from the Discworld Roleplaying Game by Phil Masters and Terry Pratchett.
> 
>  **S:** Marcella is inspired by [Anna Maria van Schurman](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna_Maria_van_Schurman). 
> 
> And that bit about hen’s teeth? [Not all that rare.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/02/060223083601.htm)
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


	2. Valence Slots * Away Party

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter songs: [No Control](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKz_YJhQtzs&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq&index=5) by David Bowie, and [Come Away To The Water](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ7pWATs-rM&list=PLLEELrwJ-FyppsRb6h4eZKiSH0LuF_bTq&index=6) by Maroon 5 Feat. Rozzi Crane
> 
> **We’ve created a Discord server for chatting about Discworld, Fallout, or this fic. Feel free to join us at<https://discord.gg/6QM4Egy>**

_Valence Slots * Away Party_

Jemzarkiza filled out a bewildering array of paperwork. Pondlife babbled at her about football, which seemed to be his instinctual fallback when he didn’t know what to do. DiMA slunk away and checked on Leonard da Quirm. He visited him, sometimes6. The human polymath was fascinating and, thankfully, easily distracted. A quick chat with Leonard and a scan of his workshop suggested that Leonard was not currently in a mood to play around with uselessium, no, he was studying the gearing of the joints of the small hopping insect _Issus coleoptratus_. DiMA slipped away from him and rejoined behind Jemzarkiza and Pondlife and the Damages Clerk, none of whom had actually noticed him leave.

When Jemzarkiza finished up with the bureaucracy, she demanded haughtily, “You’re going to unlock my wand.”

“Can you assure me that you aren’t going to use it to cause bodily harm?” DiMA inquired neutrally.

“No! This is Ankh-Morpork. I don’t want to be wandering this city with it locked,” sniffed Jemzarkiza.

“Then no. I don’t think I’m going to,” DiMA murmured. Thinking of a wand as a weapon that way made using it as a weapon the first and only option, rather than just one option of many.

“Don’t worry, I can look after things,” said Pondlife, with the confidence of someone who is sixteen.

Another part of DiMA was marvelling over… everything. Being a Generation 3 was fundamentally different in a way he hadn’t appreciated. Pulling smog into his lungs was nothing like cycling it through fans. The air had a _texture_. The Smell was different, almost more like an emotion, not a chemical breakdown of signals. He had leather-strapped sandals, which he’d taken up wearing to protect his poor metal feet from the ravages of Unseen University floors, and now he could feel the city cobbles through his sandals.

Octarine, seen through eyes and not optics, was strange, down to the bones that he now had. The world was beautiful and terrifying. DiMA was fascinated, but he was still enough of a machine that while one process was gazing at everything in soft wonder, the rest of him was looking for threats, listening to Pondlife babble about football, hearing Jemzarkiza complain about adventuring, considering if he had any tasks that he needed to complete before he left - no, he’d finished all that days ago.

“You’d better be able to,” said Jemzarkiza to Pondlife. “It’s still Dead Wizards’ Pointy Boots in Krull. And you won’t be able to take that staff with you. It’s all wands.”

“Wands! Wands are rubbish. They hold, what, ⅓ of a charge?” Pondlife complained.

“You’ll have to live with it. Or you won’t. Krull isn’t as magic-rich as Ankh-Morpork. If a few folks had staffs, they’d hog all the magic,” said Jemzarkiza, matter-of-fact, but DiMA sensed that she wasn’t saying everything.

“Aw, fiddlesticks. I’ll have to bum one off my mate Skiffy. Skiffy’s mad about wands,” said Pondlife, rather glumly.

DiMA considered saying that Pondlife could just use a stick, but no one liked a know-it-all.

Pondlife then asked brightly, “Do you go in for wands, DiMA?”

“I have one,” DiMA said, which he knew wasn’t really an answer. He used a soldering iron for the aesthetic. He didn’t actually _need_ it. He tried to gently divert the conversation back to what he thought was the more salient point, “Dead Wizards’ Pointy Boots?”

“You want to advance? You have to kill another wizard.” For a moment, Jemzarkiza looked rather bleak, staring off at a nothing that DiMA was quite sure was actually nothing.

“But that’s Faculty,” said Pondlife.

“No, it’s the final exam for graduation, too,” Jemzarkiza mumbled. “Very final.”

“Oh, good thing we’re just doing a semester, then,” Pondlife said cheerily.

“Just the final semester,” said Jemzarkiza.

“ _Wot_ ,” said Pondlife, catching onto the insinuation.

“You’ll be randomly assigned another student to kill. If you kill that assigned student or kill your assigned killer before they kill you, you graduate, provided that all your other grades are in order,” said Jemzarkiza, with just a hint of bitterness. “If your assigned target and your assigned killer both die, but you aren’t involved, you have to repeat the year.”

“Erm… so can this semester abroad I’m doing just be an audit, rather than for credit?” asked Pondlife, his voice gone rather squeaky.

What DiMA asked was, “Why is it this way?” his voice carefully neutral.

“No, and it’s _tradition_ ,” said Jemzarkiza, and DiMA didn’t think that she was saying everything.

Pondlife did a few mental calculations and asked, “Wait, so… you’ve got classes graduating at sixteen?” Most wizards at Unseen University started at sixteen, although they’d had students as young as four.

Jemzarkiza snorted, “The late-bloomers, yes.” Her expression turned calculatedly innocent. “The hydrophobes start training at birth.”

Pondlife did some more obvious mental calculations. “Er… how’d’ya know they’re gonna be wizards at birth? I mean, it helps if you’re born under a favourable star sign, but that’s not a guarantee, and I guess there’s always the eighth son of an eighth son, but those aren’t common…”

“The child of a wizard is a born wizard,” Jemzarkiza said innocently.

Pondlife stopped walking and stared off at nothing - and DiMA double-checked; it _was_ nothing - an expression of horror slowly spreading across his face. DiMA waved his hand in front of Pondlife’s face and flicked his fingers at the corners of Pondlife’s eyes, trying to elicit a threat response. DiMA sighed and observed, “You broke him.”

Then he picked up Pondlife and slung him over his shoulder, which he could do, because as a Gen 3, he didn’t have fragile vacuum tubes on his shoulders.

“But I didn’t break you,” Jemzarkiza noted, eyes narrowed.

“I try to avoid having any expectations about what wizards are or aren’t and can or cannot do,” DiMA replied.

“Hmm. That Patrician is a wily one,” said Jemzarkiza.

After they reached the University, DiMA let his narrative shift lapse, and he was again a Gen 2, which he excused with, “Everyone knows this shape for me here.” He dropped Pondlife off in a lecture on Virtual Anthropology to sleep off his existential crisis, and then he attempted to introduce Jemzarkiza to Mister Stibbons.

Ponder waved DiMA off irritably. “DiMA, ‘speak with witch about Lancre exchange course’ is not on my schedule.”

“I am _not_ a witch,” Jemzarkiza said pointedly.

“Neither is ‘entertain enchantress from faraway land re: guest lecture series’,” said Ponder, not looking up from his clipboard.

Jemzarkiza pulled her wand from her wand sheath, seething. “Can an enchantress do -”

Ponder frowned at his clipboard. “Actually, it says ‘discuss with Krullian wizard about transport re: student semester abroad’. DiMA, could you go and fetch him?”

DiMA sighed. “Sir. She’s right here.”

Ponder polished his glasses and, as DiMA’s words caught up with him, blinked. “She? Erm, I think a mistake has been made.” He put his glasses back on. “I’m sure Krull doesn’t _really_ have female wizards. That’s just the sort of libel people say about other countries.”

“My name is Jemzarkiza, and I am a wizard of the sixth level, the Suit of Turtles, B.E.7, M.A.C.8

-”

“Sixth level?” Ponder looked puzzled. “Oh, right, sometimes overseas wizards go by valency _slots_ , rather than by the clearly superior ranking system of maximum valency slot _value_ , so that makes you, oh, third level, if, er… well, if female magic-users were categorized that way, which they aren’t.”

DiMA whispered, “Sir, some allowance for Cultural Traditions may be in order.”

“There’s a quantum difference in the capacity between a wizard with nine slot valences and a wizard with ten slot valences, and the faulty maximum valency slot value system would categorize both wizards as of the third level, even though the ten slot wizard has also had her eyes opened to deeper arcane mysteries of the craft, such as increased potency of cantrips -”

Ponder chuckled ruefully. “That’s what Runes argues, too, but the maximum valency slot value system is so much _neater_. There’s only eight levels, and you know immediately the highest slot value a wizard can field - speaking theoretically, of course; many class levels these days are purely honorary -”

“- which only debases the entire level/class/rank system,” said Jemzarkiza.

“Of course, it also reflects the changing academic landscape, that capacity with, for example, funding acquisition may actually be more important as a wizard than sheer ability to bring slot valences to bear,” said Ponder.

DiMA watched, fascinated, and he wondered what mental gymnastics Mister Stibbons was going to vault through in order to maintain that mental fallacy that a woman was not a wizard when she argued _precisely_ like one.

“But it ruins planning team operations, when it’s absolutely critical to know what slot valences a wizard has available. One does not want to bring a seventh level economancer to a demonic incursion, indeed, a mere fifth level abjurer may actually be a better selection in that scenario -” Jemzarkiza supposed.

“Well, yes, if you’re doing Hazard Response Planning, that’s completely different,” Ponder granted, “but in terms of academia and the promotion committee -”

Jemzarkiza looked up and muttered, ”And this is why we still do Dead Wizards’ Pointy Boots.”

“That’s last century thinking,” Ponder sniffed. “Anyway, _Miss_ Jemzarkiza, since Krull can’t be bothered to send an actual wizard, you’ll be here at 11:00 AM, sharp -”

“The stars would be more amenably aligned at 10,” Jemzarkiza said.

“No, no, Hex’s calculations are quite clear,” said Ponder.

Jemzarkiza rummaged through her pockets, pulled out a string of flags, and then pulled out some hand-drafted stellar calculations. “Ah, your vaunted thinking engine, because you need a machine for that. It’s clearly not taking into account the albedo of A’Tuin’s eyes -”

“He,” DiMA corrected absently.

“The albedo of A’Tuin’s eyes is actually extraneous if you run a fourth order reduction…”

DiMA let them argue and slipped away. He had things to do. Sure, he may have already done them, but he decided that verifying that they had stayed done would be better than remaining.

6 Which entailed sneaking into a secure part of the palace without permission, but it didn’t count if he didn’t get caught.

7 Bachelor of Evocation

8 Master Ars Chelonia

* * *

The diplomat, Carillon Selachii, did indeed stagger in at just about the last minute, when Mister Stibbons and Jemzarkiza had finally decided that the correct celestial bodies were all either properly aligned and/or unaligned for a teleport. He appeared to be hungover. DiMA, who had many college student friends, knew the look.

Pondlife was there with his luggage, looking a bit reality-hungover. He was rather in denial about what was going to happen with his away semester. Pondlife pointedly avoided looking at Jemzarkiza. He was talking to Alf about football.

Nick and Nick - his brother had been split into two people temporarily, one a werewolf - had shown up to wish DiMA farewell, for which DiMA was deeply grateful. He loved his brother; loved how Nick inspired him to be a better DiMA.

A DiMA who didn’t do things he had to forget.

“You trust that? Having all your atoms ripped apart?” asked the synth Valentine, with regards to the teleportation spell that DiMA, Pondlife, Jemzarkiza, and Carillon would shortly be using.

“No,” said DiMA calmly, “but alternative transport options are lacking.” The problem with brooms was that there was a folk-magic superstition that they did not work well over water, and if someone believed that superstition, it became true for them, which meant that most of the party would not have been able to use a broom over the ocean. Also, it would have been a long trip, even by broom.

Hex sometimes spoke from a blank white mask affixed to one of the wall, and he did so now, in his voice as smooth as clarified butter, “Have you checked your waterproofing recently, DiMA? Just asking.”

“Waterproofing?” asked Pondlife.

“Krull’s an island nation,” said Jemzarkiza.

Like Pondlife, Mister Stibbons was also trying hard to ignore Jemzarkiza. Possibly because it gave him something to do other than acknowledge the woman in the room, Ponder said to DiMA, “Look, DiMA, I’m still going to need those third order newt reductions done by next week, so if you could put them in a pocket dimension and then give me a Sending of the planar coordinates -” 

“I already finished them, sir,” DiMA said smoothly.

“Oh. Well. Don’t waste too much time with astrozoology. That’s a soft magic, you know,” said Ponder.

Jemzarkiza snorted, “You only say so because Ankh-Morpork’s so light-polluted.”

“If Ankh-Morpork’s light-rich, we ought to be able to see better, so I don’t know where you get off,” said Alf.

“Right about now, I’d say,” Ponder muttered, and then he added in a louder, more authoritative voice, “Everyone into the teleportation ring who’s going. Which should just be DiMA, Pondlife, the… diplomat, and our… visitor. No, Xian, you may _not_ go to Krull, get back to your desk.”

DiMA gave both Valentines a tight hug and said, “I wish that I could be here for your reunification. I love you, brothers. Be well.” Then he stepped into the white chalked circle.

“Safe travels,” said the werewolf Valentine, the synth Valentine echoing him. They were, after all, the same man. Then Valentine asked of Pondlife, “Don’t you have any family to see you off?” 

Pondlife fidgeted, “Oh… my parents think I’m dead, and I’m trying not to disappoint them.”

“Good riddance, Ankh-Morpork,” Jemzarkiza grumbled contentedly.

The teleportation circle flashed. DiMA hit the waves. He scrambled, grabbing his luggage to stay afloat. Then he remembered that, logically, he ought to be able to swim. Nick could swim, because they’d reused the swim cycle animations. He realized that Hex must have just slightly undershot Krull; DiMA could see the misty island in the distance, rising above the waves. Better an undershoot than overshoot; an overshoot would have led to them falling off the Disc entirely.

Pondlife swam circles about the little bobbing group, and he said enthusiastically, “This is better than Mort Lake!”

Jemzarkiza blinked eyes bleary with salt, and she squinted at the horizon. Then she hissed to DiMA, “Get changed.”

Above the waves, something shaped like a lense was skimming. DiMA nudged his narrative over to the side, and suddenly, sea-salt was stinging his eyes, and a gulp of water left him sputtering and coughing. Lungs were an inconvenience.

While DiMA was busy trying to hack up a lung, Pondlife asked, “Oh, is that Fresnel’s Wonderful Concentrator?”

Jemzarkiza said, “I think that’s what you lot call it.”

DiMA found himself hauled up onto the… whatever it was. His salt-stung eyes were blurry, and rubbing with his fingers - and having actual padded tips to his fingers made him feel so clumsy - made everything worse. He didn’t know how to fix this. There was water sloshing around inside his ears, which distorted the sound. He tried tapping the side of his head, as if he was dealing with a positional short circuit, to no avail. How did fleshlings deal with all these sensory distortions?

His body seemed to have more of an idea of what it was doing than he did, though, as he blinked profusely, and his vision slowly started to clear. Pondlife chattered, “Hello there! So you lot are hydrophobes, then?”

Carillon groaned, and he sounded as if he were coughing, too.

DiMA could somewhat see there were eight-black robes figures arrayed around the edges of the lense. They grumbled. Standing on the lense was a woman who nodded to Jemzarkiza. She asked, “And these are the Ankh-Morporkians?”

Jemzarkiza nuged DiMA with one of her pointy-toed high-heeled shoes and said, “Yes. As motley as you’d expect from foreigners.”

The blurry blob that was Carillon staggered to his feet, and he introduced, “Sir Carillon Augustus Jenkings Livingport Selachii, at your service, my lady…?”

“Marchesa, tenth level wizard, the Suit of Swords, B.H, M.H., Ph.H9,” said the woman.

DiMA’s eyes finally cleared, and he sat up on the lense, clutching his luggage. The woman was very dark-skinned, with white hair and white lipgloss, and she looked older than what he expected her actual age was, which was odd. Wizards usually aged well, like the wine and cheese they copiously imbibed. In fact, all of the black-robed wizards on the craft appeared to be aging poorly.

Marchesa then looked over at Pondlife and said, “Ankh-Morpork did not send a wizard as their delegate?”

“Oh no, wizards don’t involve themselves in politics,” said Carillon.

Marchesa looked over at Jemzarkiza, who confirmed, “Ankh-Morpork is quite backward.”

“It’s better off this way, you must understand. Lets the old chaps get on with their contemplation,” said Carillon.

Pondlife seemed to be compelled to defend Ankh-Morpork, and he mumbled, “‘sides, my parents used to say we - that, is wizards - had tried a few years before I was born, and we’d bodged it up.”

The Krullians’ looks turned almost pitying, and Marchesa said, “‘Bodged it up’. Yes, I can imagine how that might have happened.”

“But anyway, I’ve never seen hydrophobe witches,” said Pondlife, rather brightly.

Jemzarkiza rolled her eyes and reminded, “We’re not witches. We’re wizards. Get it through your head.”

Pondlife suddenly hesitated, “But you’re women, and women can’t, uh…” He stared bleakly off at the horizon.

DiMA finally found his feet, and he observed, “You’re having some difficulty reconciling your worldview with the reality before you.”

“If my education taught me anything, it’s that whatever a man can do, a woman can do more cheaply,” Carillon said.

Marchesa looked at DiMA and narrowed her eyes. “You’re not having trouble, your accent’s off, and you’re concentrating on a spell.”

DiMA shrugged. He said, “I’m not exactly Ankh-Morporkian,” which addressed all three of those things. He let his gaze slide back over to Pondlife, and he said gently, “You’re going to have to reconcile this, Pondlife. You can’t keep having existential crises. For one thing, it’ll make the coursework tricky.”

“But if a woman touches a staff, it stops working! And - and - their brains overheat! And anyway, if a woman does magic, it comes out all witchy, like midwifing and -” Pondlife babbled.

One of the other wizards, who was at work keeping the lense skimming over the sea, grumbled, “Drowning’s the worst way to go, wouldn’t wish it on my mother in law, but for him…”

DiMA delicately caught one of Pondlife’s flailing hands and snapped the fingers of his other hand - it was strange, being able to snap his fingers. With worn metal fingertips, he couldn’t pull it off, but with soft flesh-padded fingertips, he could. He pulled his fingertips apart and ran a thin electric voltage between them. “Pondlife. Look at this. What colour is it?”

Pondlife focused miserably on the magic current running between DiMA’s fingers. He mumbled, “‘s octarine.”

“Yes. Now look at them,” DiMA prompted, gesturing at Jemzarkiza and Marchesa. “What are they?”

“Eh… en…” Pondlife stuttered. To work magic with any semblance of safety, one had to see reality as it was. DiMA had gone through his own troubles with that. Denial and self-delusion were seductive protective cocoons.

"They're wizards, Pondlife," DiMA said softly. "Do you want help seeing that, Pondlife?"

"If I close my eyes, they'll go away, and I'll wake up, and I'll be back lost in the library again," Pondlife muttered.

"Reality does not require that you acknowledge it. It continues to be so with or without your consent," DiMA said soberly.

Carillon clapped his hand on Pondlife’s shoulder and said, “The Assassins’ Guild school is co-ed. Really helps prepare a lad for the real world. Puts all the surprises up front, you know, like the way girls have of dumping poison in your lunch juice when you aren’t looking. I daresay this will be an education for you, though perhaps not in the sense you were hoping. You’ll be fine, sport.”

Pondlife sighed, and when he opened his eyes, the teenager had a thousand yard stare. He exhaled heavily. “...sport. Right, so… how are the girls at running? Running’s important in football…”

9 Bachelor, Master, and Doctor of Philosophy of Hydrophobia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A:** The Discworld Roleplaying Game by Phil Masters and Terry Pratchett mentions that Krullian wizards tend to use wands, rather than staffs, and that wands can't hold as much of a charge as a staff. Insofar as the nation of Krull almost blew itself up in a magical explosion in The Colour of Magic and that said magical explosion severely depleted Krull's ambient levels of magic, it makes sense that Krullian wizards would use wands both a) to try to avoid further magical explosions and b) to conserve Krull's already-depleted magical stores.
> 
> This fanfic was influenced both by dystopian works such as the Japanese action-thriller Battle Royale and also The Hunger Games and Divergent.
> 
> It's mentioned in The Colour of Magic that hydrophobe wizards start training at birth. However, how can you know if someone is going to be a wizard from birth? The eighth son of an eighth son is traditionally a wizard (and Equal Rites tells us that it doesn't even need to be an eighth son; the eighth child of an eighth child qualifies to be a wizard, too). However, eighth children of eighth children are rare; Krull would hardly produce enough hydrophobes for its needs.
> 
> Sourcery tells us that the child of a wizard can also be a born wizard. (The eighth child of a wizard is a problem.) There is no indication that Krullian wizards are celibate.
> 
> There are also random people who manifest magical powers later in life, usually around puberty. (For example, Ponder Stibbons is implied to be one of those people.) There are some families that are implied to turn out more wizards and witches than average; the Weatherwax family, for example, has turned out both wizards and wizards.
> 
>  **We love comments of all lengths, and understand the need for low-energy commenting like kudos. If you ever find yourself wanting to give us additional kudos, feel free to leave a comment of an icon or emoji of a heart!** <3


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